Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday June 27, 2007 @10:58PM
from the but-how-is-it-on-popcorn dept.

An anonymous reader writes "From the newscientist article: "Key to GRC's process is a machine that uses 1200 different frequencies within the microwave range, which act on specific hydrocarbon materials. As the material is zapped at the appropriate wavelength, part of the hydrocarbons that make up the plastic and rubber in the material are broken down into diesel oil and combustible gas.""

Yes you can recycle CDs into components like aluminum and polycarbonate; however, polycarbonate is a plastic. Unless you have a use for polycarbonate (like other CDs), it's use is limited. This method allows you to take the process into more basic components like fuel which has more general usage.

Depends on your definition of general. Fuel gets used for basically 1 thing. To make cars and other machines with internal combustion engines move. Plastics are used in the construction of just about everything. So, if you make fuel, you can sell it to people who need fuel. If you make plastic, you can sell it to people who need just about anything.

If you make plastic, you can sell it to people who need just about anything

No, the reason why plastics are not very recyclable is that you cannot substitute one plastic for another. The previous method recycles polycarbonate from CDs only into polycarbonate. Polycarbonate cannot be used instead of polyethylene, polypropylene, polyvinyl chloride, etc. These other plastics have far more uses. So turning into fuel is a more general use to me.

The problem with current plastic recycling is that you reduce the length of the polymer molecules each time you recycle, reducing the quality of the plastic. So you can't turn PET bottles into PET bottles indefinitely; you have to turn them into lower-quality plastic items such as plastic speed bumps. After a couple of cycles, the plastic ends up in a landfill.

And that only applies to thermoplastics (which can be melted). Thermosets, which cannot be melted, are much more difficult to recycle, and are "downcycled" much farther in quality.

The beauty of the "giant microwave" process is that it turns plastic recycling into a truly cyclic process, instead of a delayed linear process. If you transform plastic back into its raw material, you can recycle it into plastic of equal or greater quality (upcycling). You keep it out of the landfill for much longer (not accounting for people who don't bother to recycle).

Exactly. In a way, plastics recycling is like paper recycling. You generally cannot turn recycled paper into normal paper stock for general office use. Recycled paper is used for things like packaging. The two main reasons are degradation as you mentioned and additives like inks. Every recycle of paper and plastics makes them for general use. In paper the paper fibers get degraded like polymer chains in plastic get shorter. Also it is very difficult to separate the additives like inks with out a heav

Not ideal, to be sure. And it IS what their first customer appears to be doing. Still, this is better than burying the plastic in a landfill and pumping more oil out of the ground to be burned. I guess baby steps are better than no steps at all.

same here. metals, oil, gas... rubbish piles have all of them in 100x the abundance that natural deposits do. whats lacking is methods to get them, no doubt some clever cookies will figure that out once the price is right.

That sounds to me like a recipe for high inflation. After all, the only thing that causes inflation, is inflation: things get more expensive so people demand a pay rise, and then having to pay workers more makes things get more expensive.

Actually not. Money, is a commodity.

It acts just like any other commodity. If there's too much coffee, the value decreases. Money works in exactly the same way. Inflation can only occur if there's too much money in the economy, the value of the individual dollar/pound/euro decreases and everything else appears to increase in cost. All that's happening is that the currency is devaluing, which you then see on the currency markets as well.

The dirty little (non) secret of our current monetary system is two fold. First, "the national debt" and second "fractional reserve banking".

The first point is that the government and central bankers create money from nothing and create a national IOU to balance it. The government borrows money from the bankers and they write down this debt and demand interest on it. The money has been borrowed into existence. This money is then paid to government employees, contractors, suppliers etc where it enters the economy.

The second stage of this is the fractional reserve banking system. This is perhaps the biggest scam ever created. The fractional reserve banking system allows commercial banks to loan out to people more money than they have in reserve. Hence "fractional reserve" Typically they can loan out up to 20 times more than they have in deposits. That is they only have to have on hand about 5% on average of what they are allowed to loan out.

So this money comes from the government national debt, into the economy, lands in the banks deposit accounts and is then multiplied about 19 times as loans. 95% + 95% of that 95% and so on till it reaches 0. It's a recipe for creating both massive debt and massive inflation.

Which the central banks and government attempt to control using the base interest rates. Essentially what it does is divide society into the creditors and the debtors. Every dollar that someone owns is one dollar's worth of debt, owed by someone else. There are other implications also with constantly and repeatedly paying 5% interest on money.

1. The bankers will ultimately be the sole and inevitable owners of everything. They set the rules of the game years ago.

2. Everyone has to work an extra 5% harder each year for their cash, because they have to try to pay this debt. This has implications for everyone and everything. All businesses, taxpayers must constantly expand their efforts by that 5% every year to service this interest. Think about it. This is an exponential increase. 100%, 105%, 110¼%, 115¾%, 121½% and we have to try to keep up. It explains why capitalism has become so rapacious. The debts have to be serviced and to even pretend to do so requires an exponential increase in the economy.

3. The debt can never actually be paid. There isn't enough money in existence to pay of the debt, ever. Because of the interest on the initial creation of the money. You borrow $100 into existence but owe $105 at the end of the year, the extra $5 doesn't actually exist, it was never created, so you borrow some more. And so we divide into the people who have managed to pay the debt and people who are saddled with mounting levels which are literally impossible to pay.

It didn't used to be this way. A trade used to mean that two people exchanged something of value. A chicken for a duck. Both of them benefitted. Even when money came along, it still meant that both parties benefitted, they were exchanging items they valued more, a chicken for a dollar, it wasn't required for someone somewhere to lose out. That all changed during the last century. Our money became debt based. Every dollar/pound/euro/yen/yuan required a debt, paying interest to the bankers, interest on money they created from nothing.

Gold has intrinsic value. Paper does not. Hence, paper money is a form of tax

Gold has no intrinsic value beyond it's usefulness in industry. A starving man in the desert would accept bread and water before accepting gold. Gold is useful as a currency because it is widely accepted around the world, not because of any intrinsic value.

3. The debt can never actually be paid. There isn't enough money in existence to pay of the debt, ever. Because of the interest on the initial creation of the money. You borrow $100 into existence but owe $105 at the end of the year, the extra $5 doesn't actually exist, it was never created, so you borrow some more. And so we divide into the people who have managed to pay the debt and people who are saddled with mounting levels which are literally impossible to pay.

Why is inflation the way it works? Because deflation would kill millions of Americans.

So will hyperinflation caused by currency de-valuation, due to oversupply and no demand, which is a scenario we're facing now.

Huh? The debt is no different than my personal debt. I have some income. I have some expenses. I have some debt. I pay more on my debt than the interest, and the debt goes down. Eventually, it becomes zero

As individuals we can theoretically pay down our own debt faster than it accumulates by reigning in our spending, or working harder or whatever. But this can't happen on the macro-scale, if I start paying my debt faster, it just means someone else is falling behind faster (indirectly because they are paying me more, or suffering from me not buying as much).

There simply isn't enough money in the system to pay everyone's debt down. Unless we print more, and then lend it to people... which is exactly what we do. Except that borrowing more money to pay down the debt doesn't really get us anywhere.

Its equivalent to paying your Mastercard with your Visa.

Intuitively eventually this catches up to you, and it looks like this is finally starting to happen. They thought as long as the population grows, and technology advanced, that the total productivity of the nation would keep up with the currency debt spiral, and the 'balance' could be held indefinately.

Deflation has been deemed worse than inflation. Deflation is harder to manage than inflation. So a "small" inflation has been built-in to our economy to ensure stability of the economy. People much smarter than you determined that this is an acceptable trade off.

They knew it was unstable, but they thought they could control it. I can't say for certain that it absolutely can't be controlled, but its becoming clear that they, at the very least, lacked the discipline or ability to control it.

Inflation is rising, despite their best efforts to keep it low, and they're lying about it. They are changing the rules, and redefining things to hide the true inflation rate. The use of hedonics for example.

If you bought a computer 3 years ago for $1000, and then replace it with one that today also costs $1000, but is twice as fast. They count it as a $2000 dollar computer (because its 'twice as good' as the old one) and inflation shows that the price of computers today is half what it was 3 years ago, despite the fact that we're still paying the same amount.

Of course, when the price actually goes up, they substitute an inferior product to keep inflation numbers looking low. Suppose you bought a desk for $200 dollars several years ago and it was made of, oh say, actual wood. And then you try to buy that same furniture today, you'd find might it would cost $1000 perhaps, you know, due to the inflation of the price of wood... but you can get a piece-o-crap desk at walmart made of plastic and particle board for $200 bucks -- well then we'll just substitute for that and inflation shows a 0% change. Desks are still $200 hurrah!

And when something is really ugly, like the recent fuel price hikes... well how are we going to fix for that? Its not like we can substitute a cheaper product in? How about we just not count fuel anymore? Ok! So, now inflation is reported excluding energy. (And food is excluded to for that matter.)

So lets see... inflation is supposed to be a broad measure that tells us essentially how much more money we need this year over last year in order to maintain the same standard of living? Yet it excludes the cost of fuel and energy. It requires that I buy inferior products. And even though my cellphone costs the same as the last two I've bought I'm supposed to think I've massively splurged on it because it now has a camera, and picture caller id.

So what exactly does 'inflation' mean NOW? Its just a meaningless number so detached from reality that its useless, except that people still find it pschologically reassuring to hear that inflation is

Industrial-sized gas spectrometer. Drop the garbage through an electric arc, change it to a plasma, pass it by a magnet. Lighter atoms hit the pipes furthest to the side, heavier elements those straight ahead. Empty the "plutonium" bin often.

The only problem is that they also have a very high density of thoroughly toxic materials, stuff that you really don't want disturbed if you can avoid it.

Unfortunately, I could easily see it being economically infeasible to mine garbage dumps, because the cost of environmental remediation would be worse than just leaving the resources there, entombed with all the hazardous stuff.

Really, if we had a slightly longer planning horizon than we seem to have, we'd at least be sorting our garbage before burying it, instead of piling it all together. Just pulling out all the metal and putting it in one hole, with the plastic and organics in another, or burying similar types of appliances together, would make the landfills that much more attractive to mine later on.

True, but how is it enforced? Perhaps in the Netherlands, people can be trusted to just do it, but I'm not sure that would work here.

In fact, I'm pretty sure that in my municipality, it's technically illegal to throw out anything that's toxic into the regular trash, but there's no enforcement mechanism, and given a choice between taking that old NiCd phone battery or fluorescent light tube to the recycling center, and just putting it in the trash... well, you tell me which one people are going to do? (Hint, it's the one that's less work.) Hell, I know people who don't even recycle metals, because it's too much work to sort stuff into the bin that they're already given. Easier just to chuck it all in one bin and not think about it. And that's only two cans, one for all mixed recyclables and one for 'everything else.'

I've heard anecdotally that in Japan, there are people who basically go through trash at transfer stations, and will hunt down (based on personally identifying information in the trash) those folks who don't sort their recyclables out and reprimand/embarrass them -- short of something vaguely creepy like that (and in the U.S., social ostracism and humiliation aren't going to work as punishments), I'm not sure any consumer-sorting programs are going to work.

Without draconian enforcement, I think the sorting has to be -- or at least has to be backed up by sorting -- done at the transfer station or dump.

From a different perspective, sorting garbage based on predetermined criteria seems to be like something that, once you get over the initial investment in the system that does it, is probably better done by one giant machine that sorts the garbage for 100,000 people, than each of those 100,000 people having to take a few minutes a day to think about it. From a purely economic perspective, the opportunity cost of everyone's time probably justifies an automatic sorter, and when you factor in the recovered value from the recyclables [1] and the possible "dump mining" aspects that it creates later, I'd think it would be a good investment.

[1] The value of the metal and Type 1 plastic, anyway; the higher-number plastics don't seem to be worth recycling right now, at least based on what I've read.

A local town started limiting each household to 2 trashbags per week. If you needed more than that you have to buy special green trash bags for $1.50 each. The result? Trash volume is down, and recycling is up 40%. Just save up before you clean out your basement...

The problem with these sorts of things is that the people who really contribute to the problem will just look at the fee as a way of alleviating their guilt.True story:

A day-care center was having a real problem with parents arriving late (2-3 hours after they were supposed to) to pick up their kids. So someone at the day-care center had the bright idea of charging $10 per incident if a parent was more than 30 minutes late. Guess what happened? MORE parents showed up late and paid the $10! They felt like th

Here in my municipality in the Netherlands we separately collect organic, glass, paper, textiles, toxic, and regular waste, and we also have pretty strict limits on amounts of regular and organic waste: a 140 liter bin every two weeks. The bin is marked with the address.The police do give fines for not properly separating waste in the bins, but there are huge differences between municipalities in how often they check waste bins. It depends on whether they have better things to do really. The police also giv

Just need to have non-stupid options. Every four or five months, I check with my state's waste management website for how to handle the tricky stuff (like fluorescent tubes and button batteries), mostly because that's about how often I lose a CFL. Their answer is that I must drive halfway across the state (it's a small state, but the way the roads are, half-way across might as well be all the way across). Also, I have to make a special appointment for the privilege.

I might consider doing this when my CRT monitor finally fails, but somehow I doubt that burning 12 gallons of gasoline for a single compact bulb is less harmful to the environment than tossing it in with the regular trash. And if it's not, then there's no point in my continuing to use them, as the 12 gallons of gasoline puts the lifetime cost well over that which regular light bulbs would've been over the same time period. They fail to break often enough that just accumulating a bunch of spent CFLs is really an option. It'd take me ten years to fill a small box with 'em, and frankly, I don't want to store hazardous waste for that long.

The items aren't exactly very large or numerous. I fail to see why they can't just put one or more small bins at the transfer station for them. How much space would a whole town's worth of expired button batteries need to take, anyway?

Yeah, precisely. On the upside of the "two weekly rubbish collections" is the fact that you no longer have to make the trek to the recycling centre under your own steam. For a non-car-owner (yes, we exist), that is more onerous than it sounds (at least if you have a car, you can load it up on your way to the supermarket -- all large supermarkets have recycling centres).

Look at super markets, lots and lots of items in small tiny packages. Can I bring my own 4 gallon container and fill it up with shower gel? NO.Why not? Why cannot items be prices per volume, not per packet.Or if super markets provided recycling bins so you can bring back old containers/wrapping and pay the consumer back with a store credit that willreduce garbage dumps massively. Id like to see a 30cent discount on a shampoo bottle if I bring back the old one. At least this 'discount' system bypassestaxes s

So what happens when plastics are recycled off of gold/copper wiring and sparks are among the by-products

from article:"Not only does the process produce fuel in the form of oil and gas, it also makes it easier to extract the copper wire for recycling."

So I think that they had this in their mind when designing this. You het the copper and the oil. If the process would produce sparks, it is propable safe by design. I mean: sparks, combusting gas + oil = law suit, not much of a business plan.

One of the great and wonderful things about English is that spelling reflects quite accurately the history of the word. Sure, there are some pronunciation ambiguities that are a little difficult to learn, but even ESL learners get over that hill remarkably quickly.

But with English -- unlike almost any other language -- you can look at a word and immediately know that its roots are in Greek, or Latin, or French, or Celtic, or whether it's a modern loan word. This has massive benefits for advanced literacy, as it means you actually know more words than you think you do, and can quite accurately guess at the meaning of new words you encounter -- which is of far greater utility than simply knowing how to say the word. Get the sound wrong and people will correct you almost immediately, so what's the problem?

In other languages, once a word has been imported, its roots are lost, and with that the connection to the linguistic system from which it came, and its connection to other similarly-sourced words.

So, regular spelling: great for primary school kids; not so great for everyone else who wants to use language at a more advanced level, for things like communication and literature.

They came from the same root but not really. "Gigans", the Greek(imported into Latin) word that it all comes from refers to a specific stock of really big gods. It was pronounced "gig-ans" by the Greeks and Romans. But then came Vulgar Latin and the decline of the Latin lagnguage coinciding with the fall of the Roman Empire, which pronounced the "c" and "g" weirdly when it's before i or e. When the SI used "gigans" as a prefix they reverted to the correct Greek pronunciation rather than the corrupted Ro

GRC says its Hawk-10 can extract enough oil and gas from the left-over fluff to run the Hawk-10 itself and a number of other machines used by Gershow.

That addresses the energy issue, but still leaves open the question of how much it costs to maintain the equipment. You'd have to think they've got some sort of business model worked out if they've progressed to the point of selling to customers.

Not only reducing landfill; this could be huge in electronics recycling. Much of that recycling goes on (officially illegally) in China. It goes like this: they take all parts that have copper in them and throw them in a big heap all day. At night, they douse the huge heap in fuel and light it; the plastics burn all night, spewing huge amounts of toxins across the landscape. In the morning, they collect the blackened ball of copper for sale and brush aside the ash.

One big issue comes up for me: the contents of that oil. In such a recycling process, the oil itself could simply be gelled and discarded, with the energy to run the machine coming from cleaner sources; the key issue is that you're not doing burns of toxic plastics. So it's still useful. For wider use, however, one would want the oil to be clean enough to use. What happens with chlorinated plastics, like PVC? Where does the chlorine end up? What about fluorinated plastics? And so on -- where do all of these things end up?

It obviously isn't completely unviable, as they have their first customer lined up. It must make economic sense to them.

It also doesn't require that the oil produced be comparable in price to the imported stuff, as there is additional value added in the form of reduced processing of their auto waste. If the machine creates real savings in that area then the fact that it powers itself is a nice secondary feature.

A landfill reducing device that powers itself with a net energy surplus doesn't sound like it has no commercial value.

The short of it is that you need to do is put a lot of electrical energy into water and you get hydrogen. Electricity can't run a car because you can't just have an extension cord dragging out the back. Hydrogen is a portable form of energy that a car can run on. The fact that it takes more energy to produce than gasoline is irrelevant.

no mention on how much energy it takes to run the thing, or how much energy it puts out. it's not of much use if it costs a fraction to just bury the old plastic and make new stuff from scratch.

They claim that it is capable of pulling out enough fuel to have a surplus, but even if it isn't it could still be viable as a means to recycle plastics. I don't know how economically viable that would be now, but the raw materials for plastic are likely to rise, while the price of these machines will likely fall. Even if it is not viable now, who is to say it will never be. All in all, it sounds plausible.

No mention of how much goes into removing that stuff though.
The tech can also convert the oil in shale and tar sands into natural gas and some other gases that can converted into oil... at least that's what they say. No word on how to purchase said device.

This is true and people have been using animal fat as a fuel ever since they discovered fire. Exxon realized that 150,000 people already die each year from global warming and their bodies represent an untapped, carbon neutral fuel source. Check out the results at Vivoleum.com [vivoleum.com], and you to may want to be a candle or SUV fodder. Burn guilt free!

What I gather is that they use multiple magnetrons or microwave circuits to generate frequencies that will resonate with all the common bonds in hydrocarbons, just as 2.4Ghz is the resonant frequency of the protons in a water molecule swinging back and forth. However, they also claim (for example) that it can dissolve the insulation off a piece of copper wire. But it's still the same principle as a microwave oven, so I ask: how can they put a conductor into the chamber and not have it immediately burn up due to microwave absorbtion? Cut it up into teeny bits?

WiFi is limited to less than half a watt or a watt (IIRC) by FCC restrictions of unlicensed RF transmitters, whereas microwave ovens are 500 to 1500 watts. More importantly, WiFi antennae aren't built into chambers designed to create a standing wave of energy, which amplifies their power by reflecting microwaves off the walls and giving them the chance to heat the water again.

what do you mean burn up? The sparks you see when you leave a fork in the microwave are just that: sparks. The fork is safe.That said, while the light show may look menacing, it doesn't hurt the magnetron UNLESS the fork is touching one of the walls and hence has a path to the magnetron. So sticking a wire on a tray in the middle is ok.

That had to be the worst anti-recycling link I've ever read. Heck, Penn and Teller even did a better job. Many Items are profitable to recycle, hence the existence of private scrap yards. Some consumer waste 'is' profitable, but since the US local governments decide to do curbside pickup, it no longer saves energy. They solved this problem in Vienna by having neighborhood bins. The trucks only come when the bin is full. A simple idea like that turned glass and metal (including aluminum) profitable. Granted, the profit goes to subsidize the plastic recycling, which needs local compactors to break even.

Corporate recycling (bottles from bars that go back to the bottler, unsold newspaper pickup, etc, are all private and profitable.

In conclusion, recycling consumer waste 'can' be profitable, and the low hanging fruit already is profitable. It's just that our governing bodys (that control recycling) are too dumb and wasteful to figure it out.

"Take a piece of copper wiring," says Meddick. "It is encased in plastic - a kind of hydrocarbon material. [stick it in our microwave] and we release all the hydrocarbons, which strips the casing off the wire."

I knew the microwave manufacturer's were lying to us all these years! They kept telling us not to put metal in our microwaves, and now I know why: they just wanted to keep this money-making technology to themselves. You Bastards!

They tell you not to put metal in it because you probably don't know how to do so safely and so will end up doing yourself, or your oven, a mischief. They think that if you don't do it at all, you can't possibly do it wrong. If you want to try, remember microwaves are radio waves (they're about 12cm. IMMSMC) and obey all the usual laws of radio waves. Read some advanced physics textbooks and you'll learn how to put metal objects in a microwave oven without getting the usual light show.

To summarise the physics: metals, being good conductors, tend to get a current induced in them; so does water, but, not being a perfect conductor, it also gets a potential difference across it and the old "volts * amps = watts" thing kicks in. Hence why food gets hot in the microwave, and why filament light bulbs glow in the microwave. Air is an even worse conductor, and the potential difference across the air between a piece of electrically-charged metal and the earthed oven wall might well be significant. (And no, disconnecting the earth in the plug won't help. You'll just make the oven body live. Damn those Continentals with their lovely Schuko plugs that have no fuse and will fit into a non-earthed socket with nary word of a warning. At least the worst thing that can happen in this country is that you'll plant a bare foot on a 13-amp plug in the dark. Actually, make that a socked foot; lovely fibre fragments driven deep into the wound by the sharp-edged brass pins). Once you get a PD greater than about 3MV/m (or 3kV/mm, whichever comes first) air tends to make like a metal-oxide varistor and suddenly go from being a terrible conductor to being a really good conductor. Hence the fireworks.

The process they are talking about sounds a lot like petroleum cracking, both use catalysts to break larger hydrocarbons/polymers into smaller pieces but the petroleum cracking takes place upwards of 1000 degrees so if it is already being used, why not this too? Currently to produces plastics we use crack petroleum into ethylene, propylene etc. and to produces certain precursors we use superacids, zeolites and super lewis acids which are really not very environmentally friendly. whatever use they can get out of the process without needing to crack more petrol is a good thing at least on paper.

Good! they can start by zapping all that annoying hard plastic bubble packaging that every bleeding thing seems to come in now and is harder then hell to open without damaging the contents! What frigging idiot came up with that idea?!? If there isn't a hell, they should make one, and put idiots like that in it! I know...a prison...we'll strip them naked and make sure their cells are free of anything with sharp or pointed edges, and all their meals, toilet paper, soap etc will come wrapped in their diabolical inventions!

would make the US the new saudi arabia for oil considering our huge coal deposits.

No it wouldn't.

The US used-to produce the vast majority of the world's oil. It was the largest exporting nation by far, but production has slowed and many of the oil deposits have been exhausted. The US has always been, and still is, one of the top 3 oil producing nations.

The reason the US isn't the old and "new Saudi Arabia for oil" isn't because of lack of oil, but because the US uses so much that despite the huge producti

There are countless stories of ancient technology where enlightened beings create things or destroy them by utilising special harmonic vibrations.

We have pyramids and whole cities being constructed in the remote jungle covered mountains of Peru by a small number of 'dwarfs' who move massive blocks of granite around using a nothing but a 'chiming rod'. (Sound being a vibration in teh audible spectra).

We have the armies of King David knocking down the walls of Jericho by blowing specific notes on the sacred horn of destruction. (Sound again being a vibration in teh audible spectra).

We have ancient Indians flying around in Vimyana airships and laying waste to massed armies with blasts of specially coded light waves. (Light being a vibration in teh visible spectra).

From ancient Inuit culture, we have heroes who can 'hummm' inaudible songs to summon a great whale from beneath the ice caps of the frozen north, and command the whale to do their bidding. (Subtonal vibrations in teh sensory spectra)

We have the ancient Malinese who claim to have built a city UNDER THE OCEAN in a single day, by banging two large fish together. (A vibration in teh olafactory spectra perhaps ?)

And the ancient Australian aboriginies, where the rainbow serpent created the mountains and the rivers and then literally sang day and night and linear time into existence. (A vibration in teh temporal spectra ?).

So why should we be surprised that vibrations in teh Microwave spectra hold the power to perform the modern alchemical trick of turning old barbie dolls and art-deco floor coverings into diesel fuel ?

Thats hardly progress - I would be impressed if they came up with a giant titanium chiming wand that could remotely construct a magnificent city on the Moon in a couple of hours, or a 100 square mile flawless pyramid of solid ruby on the surface of Mars over the space of a long weekend...

WTF? Why 9.1 kg? Is this a multiple of a non-metric unit converted to metric? Or the weight of a standard car's tires? The weight of one tire? Should I know this?

These numbers are attributed to Jerry Meddick, director of business development at Global Resource Corporation. I'd guess mr. Meddick originally said to the reporter "running 20 pounds of ground-up tyres... produces 1.2 gallons of diesel oil, 50 cubic feet of combustible gas, 2.2 lb of steel, and 7.5 lb of carbon black", using units he's familiar with.

Okay, a publication calling itself scientific is not going to publish figures in non-SI units. I appreciate the effort of conversion, but it's not much better to publish figures in "base 0.454", as it were. Reading in base 10, the above quote best represents (in a roundabout way) the steel yield of the machine: to get 1 kg of steel, put in 9.1 kg of ground-up tyres.

What if you want to express the total yield per unit of ground-up tyres? Use a unit amount or a power of 10 amount of tyres and calculate the rest from that:
For every 10 kilograms of ground-up tyres, the Hawk-10 produces 5 litres of diesel oil, 1.6 cubic metres of combustible gas, 1.1 kg of steel, and 3.7 kg of carbon black.

This is much easier to comprehend: if a ton (1000 kg) of ground-up tyres were delivered to a Hawk-10, it would produce approximately 500 litres of diesel oil, enough to run my 1999 Ford Focus on my 100 km per day commute 5 days a week for 20 weeks.

What's neat about this is that it takes waste products that would end up in a land fill and converts them to a usable form again... with a surplus over the amount of energy needed to do so. Not much, certainly not enough to supplant alternative fuel sources... but enough to drive the conversion process and power a few other machines nearby.

This will be great for factories all around and farms and other types of businesses that end up with a lot of waste material. Maybe we can make those 75% self-sustaining... which means they won't be depleting more raw materials as quickly. This is a good thing.

Even if the only use is for our Municipal trash companies to run their fleet of vehicles off of the trash they collect... we've won a huge gain. Maybe trucking companies could do the same... converting their used tires to fuel every month (they go through a lot of tires).

This is equivalent to farms using their biomass to convert to biodiesel or ethanol for use in their farm equipment. It's not a commercial enterprise but it reduces waste and improves their efficiency which means they can pass the savings on to the rest of us (or stop needing subsidies from tax dollars).

Doesn't necessarily follow. That would only be true if plastic was oxidized fuel, which it's not. Plastic will burn, so there's net positive energy bound up in it. The question is whether that energy is more or less than the energy required to rearrange/break enough bonds to convert it to a state which is handy to consume in engines.

FTA: "GRC says its Hawk-10 can extract enough oil and gas from the left-over fluff to run the Hawk-10 itself and a number of other machines used by Gershow." So, yeah, you get energy out of this, I guess. You do add a bunch of CO2 to the atmosphere, though...

Water vapor would be a powerful greenhouse gas, if there weren't already so much of it there. Basically, our atmosphere has so much water vapor, that every frequency of IR that can be absorbed by it is already fully absorbed. So more water vapor won't make a difference. CO2 and CH4, on the other hand, are potent greenhouse gasses because not only do they absorb IR, but they're pretty scarce our atmosphere.

Lai and Singh's work have not been supressed: rather it has shown to be hard to replicate.
And there is another explanation to the statements in the article: they mechanism of work is not as the inventors think (not at all unusual) and it is only the heat that gives the result. The article is far too thin in details to know for sure.